“Can’t seem to get my mind off you, back here at home there’s nothin’ to do…Vacation, all I ever wanted.” As the American rock band, the Go-Go’s, declared in their 1982 song “Vacation,” the aforementioned time is all they ever wanted, and who can blame them?
With less than three weeks until summer break, surely you have found yourself daydreaming about the impending summer break on occasion.
The epitome of summer break: free from all of the academic and social stress that college entails. With nothing more important to do all day than to take your dog for a walk and decide whether or not you should go to the pool.
For many young people, summer is all sunshine, ice cream and country music. However, for most of the world, just like any other time of year, there are bills to pay, mouths to feed and work to be done.
Throughout our time as students, we have become very accustomed to cherishing the three-month long period of time when we did not have to go to school. A lot of us had no responsibilities at all during our middle and high school years during summer break. Yet, instead of working on your tan this summer, why not work on your life? Better yourself through summer courses, job experiences or internship opportunities that will help to give you an edge of your fellow classmates when the time finally comes to enter the “real world,” or to apply for graduate programs.
If vacation is all you ever wanted, as it is with the Go-Go’s, then the time away from that summer vacation, the vast majority of the year, will feel like a prison sentence.
As author Eckhart Tolle asserts in his book, “The Power of Now,” living in the past, or living for the future, results in an unhealthy lifestyle. It is extremely important, Tolle says, to live in the present moment—to not worry about what you will be doing tomorrow, about how what you did yesterday will impact you today, etc.
The philosophy Tolle creates in his “guide to spiritual enlightenment,” can be applied to how we as students decide to perceive school. Naturally, for most of us, we resent school to some degree. It was forced upon us, it takes time away from other activities we enjoy and it is burdensome and stressful.
As college students, however, by this time in our lives we should realize the value of an education and the harshness of the real world. Sitting idly by in the classroom, not get involved in extracurricular activities on campus or “living for the weekend,” may seem easy for us now, but post graduation we will regret any shirking we may have done in college.